The present invention relates to remote controlled vehicles, particularly to uncrewed rovers, terrain probing exploration vehicles, and recreational toy stunt vehicles, and specifically to a two-wheeled rover with a pair of omnidirectional wheels coaxially rotatable, having actively driven secondary wheels and a dynamic stability electronic system.
Remote controlled vehicles have been introduced in the past for terrain exploration and reconnaissance missions. A factor of importance, pertinent to those scenarios, is the proper design of the vehicles enabling them to negotiate unpredictable terrain morphology.
Carriage-on-wheels type of rovers have an inherent vulnerability, in that, unforeseen terrain factors may cause the rover to tumble, or tip to its side, loosing wheel ground contact and be unable to recover. Combinations of design parameters such as a low center of gravity, long wheelbase and larger track width are usually applied to minimize the tipping tendency. However these parameters are also competing against favorable wheel clearance and overall dimensional compactness; meaning that the vehicle body needs to be lower to the ground and to occupy a larger area for added stability.
Several concepts have been brought forth in robotic applications such as involving multi-limbed, multi-symmetrical vehicles attempting to address issues of balanced, tip-resistant, orientation agnostic designs. Multi-limbed robotic exploration vehicles, although conceptually aspiring to simple geometric shapes, tend to materialize as mechanically and electronically complex structures of low speed potential.
Accordingly it would be beneficial to have a high speed, remote controlled, structurally compact, orientation agnostic, exploration rover that can be handled relatively carelessly with minimal concern of it loosing traction, or becoming stranded by tipping over, or not being able to maneuver between narrow passages.
On the recreational aspect, numerous embodiments of radio controlled (r/c) surface roving toy and hobby vehicles have been introduced in the past. Often these toy vehicles are scaled-down incarnations of real life transportation equivalents. For example a two wheel r/c toy is usually a miniature motorcycle. Similarly a four wheel r/c toy is often a scaled-down version of a car, a truck and the like. Furthermore, since transportation vehicles are intended for general public use, their control and navigational behavior requires relatively low skill levels; attainable by most people. Consequently this type of r/c toys offer a limited sense of accomplishment to a user since the entertainment factor is constrained mostly to magnitudes of speed and visual thematic variations (such as colors and decorative ornamentation appealing to human imagination).
In other occasions of prior art, creative variations of surface roving r/c toy vehicles have been introduced, attempting to improve the amusement factor, by use of mechanical adaptations for performing various stunt maneuvers. For example some toy vehicles were designed to be invertible, others were adapted for spinning in place, yet others have adaptations for tumbling, or performing wheelies, and so on. However, the recreational value of these toy stunt vehicles lies in the assumption that a human being will become amused by self-inflicted actions (initiating a stunt maneuver and then watching it unfold). A user will, arguably, lose interest sooner when handling a device that performs repeatedly a staged action, instead of handling a device that imposes spontaneous interaction, adaptation, and participation with actual physical and environmental factors.
Accordingly it would be beneficial to have an educational surface roving r/c toy vehicle designed with an inherent instability (such as having a round profile prone to involuntary free rolling) that the user would be called to manually compensate and thus be continuously exposed to a plurality of unpredictable, spontaneous (non-staged) environmental factors including gravity, inertial forces, wind factors and ground surface morphology, that dynamically affect the motion of the vehicle itself and the navigation becomes a physical intuition challenge in its own right.